Etymologies

Middle English prefiguren, from Old French prefigurer, from Late Latin praefigūrāre : Latin prae-, pre- + Latin figūrāre, to shape (from figūra, shape).

(American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

From Middle English prefiguren, from Latin praefigurare, from figurare ("to shape, picture"). (Wiktionary)

Examples

This September, Morgan was playing to a customarily packed house in Dublin when an audience member sitting near an open window heard voices that, she claimed to an Irish radio station the following day, seemed to eerily prefigure the revelations that emerged on stage a few seconds later.

And this final extract is supposed to prefigure the online horror that nothing can be forgotten once you've sent it out there: “I was struck by the thought that every word I spoke, every expression of my face or motion of my hand would endure in his implacable memory; I was rendered clumsy by the fear of making pointless gestures.”

No review could do complete justice to the magnificent two-volume biography that has been so well-wrought by Michael Burlingame, but one way of paying tribute to it is to say that it introduces the elusive idea of destiny from the very start, and one means of illustrating this is to show how the earlier chapters continually prefigure, or body forth, the more momentous events that are to be dealt with in the later ones.

But these chunky, rock-solid figures make us look back to an earlier drawing on an adjoining wall, a seemingly modest effort that takes on new significance in relation to the hardened forms and incipient geometry of the hefty 1906 figures; made as an homage to Gauguin, in 1902, the robust standing nude not only echoes that artist's monumental Tahitian vahines, but also seems to prefigure Picasso's massive women.